Juan José Saer - La Grande

Diana lets out a quick exclamation, opens her eyes, and sits up slightly, leaning on her elbows, causing, from the other side of her belly, at more or less the height of her hips, over her left flank, at an angle, her stump to appear. And her beautiful breasts, round and tanned, with their almost black nipples, like two identical copies of a ceramic object, highlight the principal feature on the elegant torso whose silhouette, from her wider shoulders to her narrower waist, could be represented, in an abstract form, by an inverted trapezoid.

— Wait, wait, let’s clarify, she says.

Nula sits up too, and their eyes meet, Diana’s lively and a bit excited, and Nula’s, from what he can tell, recovering, in a vague way, the echo of the affliction of that time.

— The thing with the panties can be explained in two different and opposite ways that men, even medical students, never think of: because of her period, or, on the contrary, because she was ovulating. That’s the best theory: when a woman’s gone that far, there’s no other reason for her to stop. There’s a third explanation, but it would be too cruel: that she simply wanted her husband to find you two like that. To make him jealous, maybe.

Nula lies back and closes his eyes again, thinking, If that was all it was it would never have been a problem at all . He remembers: Riera closed the door and started walking around the room looking at them and shaking his head. Nula started to get dressed but Lucía didn’t move; to Nula, when he’d finished dressing and was standing there unsure what to do, it seemed there was something excessive, even theatrical, in Riera’s behavior. Then Riera approached him and said, as though they were old friends, So she hooked and reeled you in too? Sometimes I ask myself if she ever does it with anyone . Hearing these words, Lucía laughed and shook her head, as though what she’d just heard had gone too far; she stood up and started getting dressed, as though she were alone in the room, and told Nula, Don’t pay any attention to him, he’ll say anything. He’s rotten to the core . And, as she finished buttoning her shirt, she started to laugh. Riera, still speaking to Nula (they each spoke about the other as if they weren’t there), said, That’s the way she is; she gets you high and leaves you dry . Nula was petrified with humiliation — at first he’d been afraid, and then, as he was dressing, ashamed, and now, combining with a hint of absurdity, humiliated. For the last fifteen days, since he saw them for the first time, beautiful and enigmatic, they’d seemed distant to him, resplendent, benevolent, and sacred, like gods who allowed him to glimpse, through their sudden appearance, a less-imperfect world, sheltered from contingency, and here they were slithering at his feet, sordid, vulgar, and perverse, adding vice, frivolity, and duplicity to the external world. I have a deal with my wife, of course, Riera said, calming down, referring to Lucía with certain consideration, proposed by myself from the very beginning, because I’m a clean sportsman, and accepted by her with full awareness of the consequences, that a successful marriage requires the complete — and I mean complete — liberty of both parties . As she listened to him, Lucía, laughing, shook her head slowly, to show her anger: That degenerate theory suits you well . Riera started to laugh too: No insults, please, let’s maintain a certain level of decency . Lucía stepped toward him and interrogated him, defiant: And what about you, haven’t you just finished spewing barbarities in front of a stranger? Apart from being referred to as a stranger, the tone of Lucía and Riera’s conversation and behavior, though they seemed excessive and unexpectedly offhand and vulgar, seemed familiar, as if he’d seen the same scene many times before, realizing eventually that, with the exception of the vulgar allusions, of course, the scene reminded him of a comedy show on television, only without the music and the canned laughter, and although they seemed to have forgotten about him, Lucía and Riera acted, constantly, as though they had him in mind, the way actors practicing their roles in an empty theater never forget that their words and their actions are ultimately intended to produce a determined effect on a crowd of hypothetical, ghostly spectators. During a pause in the discussion, Nula, in a barely audible voice, tried to suggest that maybe it would be better if he left them alone, but Riera, protesting, moved toward him energetically and patted him on the shoulder: Oh no. After what we’ve put you through you have to stay for dinner, isn’t that right Lucy? And Lucía replied, without irony or resentment, It goes without saying , and left the living room, which, without a doubt, was the only room in the house that Nula knew. Two or three times he’d followed her to the entrance and had managed to see the hallway and the interior door, whose colored glass kept him from seeing what was inside; that afternoon he’d crossed it for the first time, without going any deeper than the couch in the living room, and when Riera proposed that they move to the courtyard, where it would be cooler, Nula accepted. Riera intrigued, even fascinated, him. He followed him down a passageway, away from the living room, with two or three doorways, and then into the darkened bedroom, where the white bedspread, made of a silky material, glowed in the dim light that filtered through the cracks in the white Persian blinds over a glass door beyond that large, queen-sized bed. A sudden despair overwhelmed him when he saw the bed, accentuated by images of lust, of poorly controlled impulses, of ruin, and that anguish increased even more when, after harshly lifting the Persian blinds and leading him out to the courtyard and through a red-tiled space that separated the house from what would strictly speaking be called the courtyard, he realized that they could have gone out to the courtyard, avoiding the intimacy of the bedroom, through the dining room or the kitchen. What Nula learned from them in those months was the infantile cruelty of their perversion, their innocent reflexes, most likely unscrupulous and guiltless, that attained their ends with expertise and charm, without deceit or coercion, simply to follow their desire, so intrinsic to the most intimate fibers of their own beings that they confused themselves with it, coloring it with their strange hues but not covering its more banal qualities; and he learned that each one’s intense singularity, in radical contrast to the other’s, somehow allowed them, through a unique combination of elements in each one, unconsciously and blindly groping dark passages, against all reason, to be together; all of this he learned at his own expense. As they sat in the courtyard, the intimate touch of Lucía’s flesh persisted, trembling, in his memory, but at the same time, that easy dinner with them in the garden, first in the warm dusk and then under a soft light hanging from a tree, revealed to him an alternate world: styles, tastes, habits, behaviors, and conversation different from anything he’d known up till that moment; he had the feeling, that night, of emerging for the first time from the magical circle of the familiar: the years in Rosario, the dormitories, the university dining hall, the department, the bars, were in a certain sense an extension of his family life. With Riera and Lucía, starting from that night, his point of view changed, and from that new perspective the whole universe seemed altered. Others, outside of himself and Chade and La India, his murdered father, his philosophy books, molded, in their own way, in a parallel tunnel, the material of the world, giving it the inconstant shape of their loss and their desire, and that unknown world that Nula had begun to glimpse attracted him as much as the living flesh of Lucía.